1. Field of the Invention
The present invention relates to a method and system for providing automated forms for compliance and other purposes, as well as a user interface (UI) relating thereto, and in particular to a method and system for providing user-friendly automated forms, and completion assistance therefore, via a network, for use with compliance with legal or other requirements, such as requirements under the Individuals with Disabilities Education Act (IDEA), and for providing a UI allowing simple development of templates and corresponding code and code documentation for such forms.
2. Background of the Technology
There is an unmet need in the art for methods and systems for tracking information, supporting compliance with regulatory and other requirements, expertly assisting with completing forms, developing code and code documentation therefor, and otherwise providing assistance in meeting requirements for the complex and sophisticated management schemes that institutions need to use in order to effectively and efficiently manage mandated individualized instructional paths, disciplinary/rehabilitative paths, or social intervention paths for hundreds if not thousands of students, juveniles, etc., simultaneously, all with different start and end dates, and different internal individualized management requirements.
For example, looking at mandated individualized instructional paths, it is not uncommon to find that a U.S. public K-12 school district may need to manage 30% or more of its student population under individualized instructional programs, such as Special Education, 504, English Second Language, Early Intervention/Student Support Team, Gifted and Talented, or At Risk of Failing High Stakes Exit Exams. Each of these programs includes requirements involving events or meetings (e.g., Referrals, or Annual Meetings or Reevaluation Meetings), associated timelines, linked paperwork, and mandated outcomes. There are two key challenges for school districts in managing these programs—one is meeting the many mandated Federal and State timelines that must be met for each child, and the second challenge is filling out in a compliant manner all of the paperwork mandated for each child. On the timeline front, successful, consistent, legally compliant execution of these individualized programs by a school district requires the tight coordination of dozens of action steps across multiple team members for each affected child within relatively short time periods. Failure to effectively manage, what in many school districts may be thousands of individualized instructional paths occurring simultaneously, significantly diminishes the education effectiveness of these interventions, exposes the district to serious legal liability for violating Federal and State law, risks loss of full Federal and State funding, and drives up a districts' administrative overhead.
On the second front, managing the paperwork creates a different set of issues. In these programs, such as Special Education, it is not just simple paperwork that district staff are spending their time filling out, but rather it is paperwork with embedded legal procedural requirements. These requirements include compliance rules, such as the following: district staff check one box which immediately mandates the filling out of additional pages; when a child hits a certain birthday in the coming year, other paperwork is mandated for a transition plan for the child. Other built-in rules might be checking to see if parents are given adequate advance notice of meetings, or checking to see if a child needs a behavioral intervention plan. In Special Education, there is governing Federal law, and then each state has implemented its own interpretation of that Federal law at the state level. So every school district in this country is operating under a state specific blend of Federal and state law. It is not uncommon that there may be 200 or more compliance rules covering a district's paperwork. Many of these rules are quite sophisticated, and frequently less than 5% of the district's staff fully and accurately understand all of the relevant rules. This lack of understanding is understandable, as these staff were typically hired to teach, not to be paralegals. In addition, the situation is exacerbated by high staff turnover in districts, lack of fully certified Special Education teachers, and inadequate professional training by school districts of their own staff.
School staff incorrectly observing these compliance rules create huge legal liabilities for their districts. As one Special Educator director has observed “Parents and their attorneys are leveraging our small failures in paperwork into substantial settlements against us”. Nationally, school districts are paying out settlements ranging from the tens of thousands to hundreds of thousands of dollars for failures related to filling out the paperwork noncompliantly. Districts have responded to these failures in many cases by adding more administrators, and by hiring staff known as “compliance officers,” who basically read every set of Special Education paperwork generated in a district, manually noting the most serious compliance errors, and who then return the paperwork to the Individualized Education Plan (IEP) teams to rehold meeting that have substantial compliance problems in their paperwork. This is an incredibly costly approach for school districts to take.
All of these individualized instructional paths (or behavioral/rehabilitative/social intervention paths such as managing juvenile services) point to the unmet need for a software based method and system for tracking and supporting compliance with a management scheme around events, outcomes, timelines, and associated paperwork, including assisting with completion of forms. The appropriate needed database structure, and needed forms for production therewith, could simplistically be said to track the “Who needs to do what? When do they need to do it by? Did they do it? When did they do it? And if they were late, why were they late?” At the teacher or staff level, such a database structure and forms assistant needs to support staff at any point in time in knowing explicitly what they need to do, in determining when do they need to do it by, and assisting them with timely completing any forms relating thereto. At the administrator level, such a database and forms structure needs to let administrators manage to district standards for performance, allowing transparent accountability of district wide performance, regional performance, building or site performance, and even down to the individual provider performance.